John Mueller explains Big sites and website authority

Google’s John Mueller, during an office hour hangout, has answered a question about a big site and website authority. Someone asked whether a big site with thousands of indexed pages can influence the perception of site quality or not. He has answered no. He further said that it is not a sign of quality, and then he offered more information.

There is a traditional idea in the SEO community that big sites have better advantages over smaller ones. When a smaller site fails to get top ranking, some will shrug and write that a big one enjoys all the advantages.

It has worked as a bleak outlook with a marketing approach that the ranking algorithm goes against the small site. Despite some new algorithms like BERT and MUM, many continue to believe that bigger sites have better advantages.

The person who has asked the questions explained that they wanted to remove old pages which are performing poorly. But they have received some pushback from the site developers who have asserted that making smaller sites will reduce the advantages.

The person who has asked this question goes on to relate that the dev team is much reluctant to remove pages as they are afraid. He also asked John Mueller to shed some light on the idea of Google seeing a big site as authoritative.

John Mueller has popped this bubble on the idea that big sites have bigger advantages on smaller sites. He has further answered about a link between website authority and how big a suite is unambiguous.

A lot of this does not make much thinking to pop a hole in the idea that bigger sites have better advantages. Many of the eCommerce clients regularly outrank bigger brand retailers. Some may say that the brands can leverage their popularity to push their web pages high. But in case those sites have more than a million pages, then the idea of leveraging can change.

We are much deeper into the new era of natural language processing where the AI/ ML and BERT, Neural Matching, RankBrain, MUM will work together to use website words and images to rank the websites. It is lessening the influence for less reliable signals like links.